Ramon Mercader, Trotsky’s assassin Twitter Ramon Mercader, Trotsky’s assassin On August 20th, 1940, a 27-year-old Catalan drove an ice axe into the head of Leon Trotsky at his Mexican home. The blow failed to kill him, and Trotsky struggled with his assassin. His guards, hearing the commotion, burst in and set upon the assailant, but Trotsky stopped them, exclaiming, “Do not kill him! This man has a story to tell.” Trotsky died the next day, and the murderer was turned over to the police. He identified himself as Jacques Mornard, a disillusioned Belgian Trotskyist. He said he had killed the old Bolshevik after quarrelling over a woman and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Though few knew Mornard’s true identity, the fact that the assassination had been ordered by Stalin was an open secret. Furthermore a number of Catalan republicans in Mexico knew something more. They recognised the killer’s photo in the press, but did not want to reveal his true identity for fear of provoking a reaction against the many Spanish refugees in the country. Finally in 1952, Mercader slipped up.

A prison guard heard the “Belgian” singing a nursery rhyme Què li darem, en el Noi de la Mare? Què li darem que li’n sàpiga bo? (1) in perfect Catalan from his cell. This clue led the authorities to his real identity: his name was Ramón Mercader, and he was indeed an NKVD agent. Ramón Mercader was born in Barcelona to a well-to-do family on February 7th, 1913. His mother Caridad Mercader née Caridad del Río was from a family of aristocratic landowners in Santiago de Cuba. Following Spain’s loss of the colony in 1898, the family moved to Catalonia where Caridad, at the age of just 16, married Pablo Mercader, a rich Catalan industrialist. The couple had five children but Caridad grew to detest the staid, bourgeoisie existence and found herself drawn to the Bohemian life she discovered along El Paral.lel, with its heady mix of cabaret artists, bon viveurs and anarchists.

Seduced by the latter’s revolutionary ideals, Caridad soon became involved in direct action, even setting fire to her husband’s factory before being caught and sent to a lunatic asylum. Her anarchist friends managed to spring her from captivity, and she fled to France with her children in 1925, never forgiving the Mercader family for imprisoning her. Caridad Mercader In France, after her brief flirtation with anarchism, Caridad embraced communism, attracted by its discipline and surety of purpose. She become a fanatical Stalinist and eventually an NKVD agent. She also indoctrinated young Ramón as an ardent communist, filling him with hatred for all enemies of the party. In his early twenties, Mercader moved back to Barcelona, where he helped organise the then tiny Spanish communist party. For this involvement he was arrested and spent a brief period in prison, before being released in 1936 after the victory of the Popular Front. At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, Ramón took an active part in the successful defeat of the military rebellion in Barcelona.

The war that would tear Spain apart had begun, but in Barcelona at least, the forces of the left, led by the CNT, were victorious. The anarchist CNT trade union was in virtual control of the city and at once set about collectivising huge swathes of Barcelona’s, commerce, services and industries. It was a revolution of historic proportions, comparable only with the Paris Commune and the Russian Revolution itself. Against this tumultuous background, on July 23rd, the Catalan communist and socialists met in the Bar del Pi (La Plaça del Pi) and hurriedly joined together to form the PSUC (Partido Socialista Unificado de Cataluña), thus forming a new communist party, independent from Madrid. Moscow was deeply suspicious of this new Catalan organisation, which had broken the Comintern’s iron rule of “One State, One Party.” They need not have bothered; The PSUC soon proved itself to be a loyal servant of Stalin’s policies and was so successful at crushing socialist opposition from within that the model of merging the two parties was copied in Hungary and Poland in the late Forties.

Two days later, on July 25th 1936, the first column of volunteers was organised under the anarchist leader Buenaventura Durruti, and Ramón, though a communist, signed up to fight. He was seriously wounded on the Aragonese Front and returned to Barcelona in December. Here, his mother convinced him to become a Soviet spy, and he cut his teeth, reporting on foreign volunteers and teaching espionage to David Crook, a young British communist in charge of spying on George Orwell who was in Barcelona. (2) The war staggered on, but the NKVD had greater plans for Mercader and in July he was summoned to Moscow. There, he was trained in the arts of deception, sabotage and assassination and given the code name Gnome. In 1938, Gnome was set up in the Sorbonne area of Paris as a wealthy Belgium student, Jacques Mornard. He was handsome, impeccably mannered and endowed with flawless French and English. He quickly seduced Sylvia Ageloff, an American confident of Trotsky. The relationship paid off and he eventually gained an invitation to the home of the old Russian near Mexico City.

Mercader’s mother had also moved to Mexico to oversee the operation, entitled, appropriately enough, “Mother.” Once Mercader had ingratiated himself within Trotsky’s inner circle, it was simply a case of choosing his weapon and moment. After 20 years in a Mexican jail without revealing a word, Mercader was finally released in 1960, he was 47 years old. After a year exiled in Cuba, he moved back to the USSR and was presented with the Hero of the Soviet Union, awarded to him originally by Stalin. He was only one of 41 foreigners to receive the country’s highest accolade. Mercader would then divide his time between Moscow and Cuba, his mother’s birth country, staying as an honoured guest of Castro’s government. Meanwhile, his mother, Caridad, a constant shadow in his life, worked at the Cuban embassy in Paris. She died in 1975 in some luxury, surrounded by her jewels, perfumes and expensive clothes, an unrepentant Stalinist, reputedly drinking 40 coffees and smoking 80 cigarettes a day. The years passed and Mercader grew increasingly homesick for his native Catalunya.

With the legalisation of the Communist Party of Spain in 1977 and the return of many of its leaders, Ramón saw his chance, and asked the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), Santiago Carrillo for permission to come home. Carillo, looking for an excuse to break with Moscow and a way to steer the party towards a Eurocommunist stance, invited Mercader to come back to Barcelona on the condition that he wrote his memoirs, telling all and naming his Moscow controllers. Carrillo hoped that Mercader’s damning account would serve as justification for the rupture, but disciplined to the end, Ramón refused. Better to die in a foreign land than betray his comrades. Meanwhile, his party, the PSUC, went on to play a key role in the opposition to Franco and the transition of Catalunya. It underwent a process of destalinisation and eventually reformed in 1987 as Iniciativa, the current coalition partner in the Barcelona Council and Catalan government. A man of his times, when individuals were swept away in ideological and geopolitical struggles, Ramón Mercader was a willing and murderous servant of Stalin to whom he remained stubbornly committed to until the very end.

After dying of cancer in Santiago de Cuba in 1978, his ashes were flown to Moscow and buried in the Kuntsevo Cemetery, a place reserved for heroes of the USSR. A universal Catalan, whom Barcelona should never have sired. Notes 1. ’What shall we give the mother’s boy? What shall we give him that tastes so good?’ One has to wonder whether he had in mind the constant dark shadow of his own mother when the rhyme slipped out. 2. Indeed, as the anarchists gradually lost control to the Generalitat and the communists, the city became crawling with NKVD agents. A number of unsavoury characters who would play a leading role in the oppression of Eastern Europe worked here, including Ernst Gerö, president of Hungary during the 1956 rising. Gerö also took part in June 1937 in the abduction, torture and murder of Andreu Nin, president of the POUM, the anti-Stalinist communist party with which Orwell fought.

Barcelona has recently paid testament to the figure of Nin by naming the new library at La Rambla, 30-32 after him Nick Lloyd leads Civil War tours in Barcelona with the Centre d’Estudis de Montjuic This article was commissoned for the Barcelona Metropolian Avaialable now in print and on Kindle. The Least Known Assassin: The Story of Ramon Mercader - Soviet-Empire.com U.S.S.R. Log-in to remove these advertisements. The Least Known Assassin: The Story of Ramon Mercader Defected to the U.S.S.R.: 28 Nov 2006, 20:19 Komsomol The Story of Ramon Mercader by Dan Engler It seems a constant throughout history, that an assassin have a grand name. John Wilkes Booth, Charles Julius Guiteau, Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, Mark David Chapman; the list goes on. It was the executioner of Lev Davidovich Trotsky, however, who had the grandest name of all. Jaime Ramon Mercader del Rio Hernandez. Certainly people know this, right?

Ramon Mercader (as he is more frequently referred to) did, after all, end the life of a man with more political and historical significance than any of the Kennedy boys could have ever hoped to possess. In spite of this, Mercader is virtually unknown. On the topic of Trotskyâ€™s demise, books generally suffice it to say that the great revolutionary was killed by a stalinist agent wielding and ice pick, few texts bother to mention the assassinâ€™s mouthful of names. Despite Mercaderâ€™s obscurity, the relatively few interested historians have pieced-together a great deal about him since his fateful date with Trotsky on August 20, 1940. The son of Eustacia Maria Caridad del Rio Hernandez and Don Pablo Mercader Marina, Ramon Mercader was born February 7, 1914 in Barcelona. His childhood was less than normal. The climate in Catalonia in which Mercader grew up was revolutionary to say the least. In 1918, when Mercader was four, over 200 bombs were exploded by anarchists and provocateurs in Barcelona.

In 1925 Ramon Mercaderâ€™s parents separated and Caridad took her children to France. There she was introduced to communism by her French lover. As Caridad Mercader became an active member of the French Communist Party, Ramon shared time between his mother in France and his father in Spain. His relationship with Don Pablo, however, began to wane. By 1934 his motherâ€™s political influence prevailed and Mercader found himself fighting as a member of the communist forces against Madridâ€™s Federal Government. He organized the Cervantes Artistic Recreational Circle, a front for a cell of underground communists. On June 12, 1935 Mercader was arrested along with several other members of the group, but in 1936 the Popular Front government took over in Madrid and Mercader was released. By this time Caridad Mercader was back in Barcelona and after leading a successful attack against Francoâ€™s forces in the Catalonian capitol, took charge of the Union of Communist Women. Ramon Mercader, now a lieutenant, became a political commissar in the 27th Division.

Though she had worked indirectly as a Stalinist agent for years via the directives of the Comintern, Caridad Mercader was formally indoctrinated into the NKVD by Leonid Eitingon who operated in Spain under the alias of General Kotov. Caridad had a long running affair with Eitingon,who not only recruited her, but her son Ramon as well. Eitingon trained Mercader in the ways of sabatoge and Guerrilla warfare and in 1937, took him to Moscow for more specialized training in dissembling and assassination. Eitingon was the mastermind behind the Trotsky assassination, directing it via the Soviet consulate in New York. To get close to Trotsky, it was decided that Mercader would have to become romantically involved with someone who had access to Trotskyâ€™s inner sanctum. The NKVD chose Sylvia Ageloff, a Brooklyn social worker, Trotskyite, and confidante of Trotsky himself. It was assumed that Ageloff would be attending a secret conference of Trotskyâ€™s Fourth International (about which the NKVD had been tipped off) in France in the summer of 1938.

The NKVD used Ruby Weil, a wavering Trotskyite and acquaintance of Ageloff, to travel to Europe with Ageloff and set her up with Mercader via an agent by the name of Gertrude. In Paris, Mercader was posing as Jacques Mornard, a student of journalism at the Sorbonne and son of a Belgian diplomat. "Mornard" swept Ageloff off her feet almost immediately. He was suave, attractive, and romantic. Ageloff had no idea that her beloved "Mornard" was actually a Stalinist ideologue and NKVD assassin working towards a single goal. In fact, "Mornard" showed absolutely no interest in politics what-so-ever. He told Ageloff that he made a living writing sports articles, though she later recalled that he never once attended a sporting event during their time in Paris. During their time in Europe, "Mornard" frequently took trips, telling Ageloff conflicting and preposterous stories to explain his absences. He refused Ageloffâ€™s requests to meet his parents, claiming they would not accept her. Blinded by love, Ageloff swallowed his absurd stories.

In February of 1939, "Mornard" told Ageloff that he had accepted a position in New York as a corespondent for a Belgian newspaper. Ageloff was to leave for New York and "Mornard" would follow in some weeks. It wasnâ€™t until September that Mercader arrived in New York, this time under a doctored Canadian Passport of a one Frank Jacson (the spelling apparently being a mistake on the behalf of the NKVD forger.) He told Ageloff that he had trouble acquiring a passport because of his failure to complete compulsory military service in Belgium and purchased the fake Canadian documents for $3000. Mercader only spent a month in New York before telling Ageloff that he had secured a position with a British importer in Mexico. He gave her several thousand dollars and told her she should join him in Mexico. In mid October of 1939, Mercader arrived in Mexico city as Frank Jacson and took up residence in a tourist camp. He received word that Eitingon and Caridad Mercader would soon be arriving in Mexico to coordinate Operation Trotsky.

Mercader or "Jacson" as he was now known, bought a used Buick and settled in as he awaited Ageloff. In January, Ageloff arrived in Mexico. They took up residence in a hotel. "Jacson" told Ageloff that he had an office in Mexico City, but when Ageloff attempted to find it, she discovered the address did not exist. When questioned about the matter, "Jacson" offered that he had accidentally given her the wrong address and gave her a new suite number. Ageloff was suspicious and asked a friend to check out the new address. Ageloffâ€™s friend failed to find "Jacson" in the office, but an office boy did tell her that it was indeed "Jacsonâ€™s" office. Whatever remained of Ageloffâ€™s suspicions dissolved and she never again questioned "Jacsonâ€™s" business. While "Jacson" was "working," Ageloff would frequently make visits to Trotskyâ€™s fortified villa in the suburb of Coyoacan. She did not, however, take "Jacson" with her because, as she confessed to Trotsky, she did not want to compromise him.

Ageloff did recall, though, that during her first months with him in Mexico, "Jacson" did begin to show more of an interest in politics, particularly those of the Trotskyites. She had no idea that "Jacson" was spending his days with his mother and her NKVD lover, Eitingon. Though "Jacson" did not accompany Ageloff to the Trotsky villa, the couple did develop a friendship with Alfred and Marguerite Rosmer, the french couple who escorted Trotskyâ€™s orphaned grandson to Mexico after the murder of Trotskyâ€™s son, Lev Sedov, in 1938. The Rosmers were living with the Trotskyâ€™s at the villa in Coyoacan and often engaged in social activities with Ageloff and "Jacson." Because "Jacson" had a car, the foursome would picnic and take drives, often of great distance. "Jacson" would explain that he had business in some of these areas, areas he claimed to travel to frequently, though he was usually quite unfamiliar with the municipalities when they arrived.

When "Jacson" and Ageloff would pick up the Rosmers at Coyoacan, Ageloff would not allow, "Jacson" to enter the compound, citing her caution regarding the founder of the Fourth International. In March, Ageloff returned to New York, probably to transport documents for Trotsky. Before she left, however, she made "Jacson" promise that he would not visit the Trotsky compound during her absence. "Jacson" agreed, but shortly after Ageloffâ€™s departure, Alfred Rosmer fell ill and asked "Jacson" if he wouldnâ€™t mind ferrying him to the hospital and running errands for Rosmer and his wife while he was incapacitated. This was Mercaderâ€™s grand opportunity. During these visits "Jacson" fostered a congenial relationship with the guards at Coyoacan. After a few visits he was on a first name basis with all of them and was not checked for weapons. Utilizing his photographic memory, "Jacson" made detailed mental notes about the layout, fortifications and staffing of the Coyoacan villa which he later reported to Eitingon.

At this point, the NKVD had no plans of using Mercader as the assassin. His job was solely to gather intelligence for the planning of the assassination. After several weeks of information gathering on Mercaderâ€™s behalf, Eitingon felt that the time was right. Eitingon enlisted David Alfaro Sisqueiros, a Mexican communist and revolutionary painter, to lead an attack on the Trotsky compound. At dawn on May 24, 1940, Sisqueiros took his group to Coyoacan. He had arranged for communists within the local police department to throw a party for the department the previous evening, so the number of officers guarding the outside of the compound was minimal. The attackers parked their cars about a block from Trotskyâ€™s villa and walked to the gate. The NKVD had spared no expense in outfitting their death squad. Tailors had been hired to make bogus police and army uniforms. They were heavily armed with submachine guns, home-made incendiary devices and two dynamite bombs. The also had an extensive equipment list which included ladders, grapling hooks, and a power saw. At the compoundâ€™s gate Sisqueirosâ€™ band quickly subdued the guards and penetrated the compound.

Once inside, they opened fire. They let loose with an estimated 300 rounds, 75 alone were fired into Trotskyâ€™s bedroom, but when Trotsky was awoke by the gunfire, he hit the floor and pulled his wife, Natalia, under the bed with him. Miraculously, they survived the attack unharmed. The attackers made no attempt to enter Trotskyâ€™s quarters, certain that he could not survive the barrage of lead. The attackers fled, taking one of Trotskyâ€™s guards, an American by the name of Sheldon Harte, with them. Some of the men were later apprehended, but Sisqueiros was not. Harteâ€™s body was found buried in the basement of a house which had been rented by Sisqueiros. The failed assault forced Eitingon and his superiors in New York and Moscow to re-evaluate the course of Operation Trotsky. A new plan was devised, one in which Mercader would have to achieve an even greater level of penetration, such that he could kill Trotsky himself. Trotsky would meet "Jacson" for the first time only four days after the failed attempt on his life.

"Jacson" had learned that the Rosmers would be departing on May 28 for the United States from Veracruz, some 300 miles from Coyoacan. He did not hesitate to offer them a ride. When "Jacson" arrived at the villa on the morning the 28th, Trotsky was on the porch and introduced himself. Ever the gentleman, Trotsky invited this trusted friend of the Rosmers in for tea. "Jacson" obliged and even gave Trotskyâ€™s grandson a toy glider which he had picked up on the way to the villa. After tea, "Jacson" and the Rosmers, accompanied by Mrs. Trotsky, left for Veracruz. Natalia Trotsky had decided to go with to bid farewell to the Rosmers and keep "Jacson" company on the way back. "Jacson" took advantage of this opportunity to cultivate a friendship with Mrs. Trotsky. On June 12, "Jacson" arrived at the Trotsky compound to tell Trotsky and his wife that he would be leaving for New York on business and that they may have use of his Buick if he might store it there.

They were happy to have the extra vehicle at their disposal and wished "Jacson" a pleasant journey. Mercader evidently returned to New York to confer with Eitingon, who had evacuated the country immediately following the May 24 fiasco. Mercader stayed at the NKDV residency in the Soviet Consulate Generalâ€™s compound and Ageloff, who was still in New York, was unaware he was in the city. On July 29, "Jacson" showed up unexpectedly at the Trotsky villa to pick up his car. He stayed there for a little more than an hour. When asked if he had visited the headquarters of the American Trotskyite movement while in New York, he replied he had not, explaining that he had been to busy. This failure to conduct an obvious pilgrimage bewildered the guards at the villa and Trotsky confessed to his wife later, that he felt "Jacson" was "a little light-minded." "Jacson" visited the villa five times in the next three weeks. On August 10, "Jacson" and Ageloff had tea with the Trotskyâ€™s. During this visit, "Jacson" asked Trotsky if he would mind reading an article he had been working on.

Though Trotsky felt "Jacsonâ€™s" political mind was somewhat undeveloped, he agreed to examine his article. A week later, "Jacson" arrived for his appointment with Trotsky. Trotsky received "Jacson" alone in his study, as was customary for business calls. The visit lasted only eleven minutes. Trotsky felt the article was simplistic and offered "Jacson" some suggestions. "Jacson" said he would return with a revised version and Trotsky agreed. Later he complained to his wife that "Jacsonâ€™s" behavior had offended him. He didnâ€™t remove his hat and he sat on the edge of Trotskyâ€™s desk. By now the means of Trotskyâ€™s demise had been decided upon. Mercader, who was an expert alpinist, purchased a piolet or ice-axe. One swift blow to the back of the head should be enough to dispatch Trotsky. This was, in fact, a favored method of the NKVD. It had been used before. It was quiet and should allow Mercader to get out of the compound before anyone realized something was amiss. At 5:20 p.m.

on Tuesday, August 20, "Jacson" checked into the Trotsky compound for the last time. Caridad Mercader waited in a getaway car a few blocks away, Eitingon in another car further down the road. "Jacson" had a raincoat folded over his arm and under it lay the piolet. Concealed in his jacket was a large dagger, and .45 caliber pistol was stuffed in his boot. He also carried a letter in which he "confessed" that he had been a follower of Trotsky, who had been ordered by the latter to kill Stalin, but had recoiled from the prospect and decided to eliminate Trotsky instead. "Jacson" proceeded to Trotskyâ€™s study, and as he expected, found him alone. Pleasantries were exchanged and "Jacson" gave Trotsky his revised article. Trotsky sat down at his desk and began to read. "Jacson" took the piolet in his hand, raised it, and brought it down on Trotskyâ€™s skull. The blow, however, was not enough to kill Trotsky instantly.

As he fell to the floor he let out a terrible shriek, one which Mercader said he would "hear forever." Within moments guards rushed into the study and began to beat "Jacson." He may not have lived to tell the tale if it were not for his victim, Trotsky, who, a historian to his final day, yelled, "Do not kill him. This man has a story to tell." Sensing something was wrong, Caridad Mercader and Eitingon Fled. Trotsky was rushed to the Green Cross Emergency Hospital where, despite his massive head trauma, he remained conscious for several hours, only to die 24 hours after the attack. While in the hospital recovering from the beating, Mercader confessed to the crime. He showed no remorse and stated that history would recognize him as a great man for ridding the world of the evil Trotsky. When questioned about his identity, he told police that he was "Jacques Mornard," the son of a Belgian diplomat, but the Belgian diplomatic corps had no record of a "Mornard" and "Mornardâ€™s" story was full of historical and chronological errors. At all times he claimed to have acted of his own volition.

Mercader was convicted of murder by a Mexican court and sentenced to serve 20 years in Lecumberri prison. "Mornard" had no objection to his punishment. he said he felt it was just. During the first six months of his imprisonment, "Mornard" provided psychologist Dr. Alfonso Quiroz Cuaron a unique opportunity. Quiroz, who had become very interested in the case, asked "Mornard" if he would mind participating in some psychological tests. "Mornard," seeing it as a challenging mental game, humored Quiroz, but was careful not divulge any information which would identify himself or connect him to the NKVD. Over the course of those six months, "Mornard" was revealed to be a most remarkable individual. In addition to speaking several languages and being extremely smart about a variety of topics, he had an amazing analytical ability. Quiroz and his assistants administered several tests in which "Mornard" was allowed to examine the pieces of a very intricate, Japanese style wooden puzzle for a matter of minutes. The pieces were then removed and the doctors would return with them the next day. In complete darkness, "Mornard" would be asked to assemble the puzzle.

On every occasion, he completed the puzzle in a matter of minutes (Mercader was also said to be able to completely strip and reassemble a Mauser in total darkness in three minutes and 43 seconds.) In another test, "Mornard" was given a coded message and asked to decipher it. While he was unable to decode the message, he did grasp the theory of the cipher in a matter of minutes and prepared his own encoded message for the doctors. Mercader possessed incredible skills of memory. He could remember seemingly unending sequences of numbers, words in foreign languages and nonsense syllables. His senses were abnormally acute. He had an extremely accurate sense of time, he could walk six yards down a chalk line while blindfolded without the slightest deviation, and he could detect differences in the levels of objects over which he passed his hands within three hundredths of a millimeter. In one test he was blindfolded and given a selection of metal engravings, each one centimeter square. He was able to draw each of the engravings simply by what he felt with his fingertips. Quiroz concluded that "Mornardâ€™s" skin was hypersensitive, but when his pain threshold was tested, he achieved superhuman results.

During his 20 years in prison, "Mornard" never revealed his true identity or the fact that he worked for the NKVD. He was a model prisoner, taught others how to read and started a vocational training system in the prison. Though "Mornard never offered it himself, he was identified in 1953. Quiroz had been tipped off by what he thought to be evidence of a Catalonian dialect in writings "Mornard" produced in the course of his tutoring. Quiroz began searching archives in Barcelona for something which might identify "Mornard." In August of 1953, officials in Barcelona notified Quiroz that "Mornard" was, without a doubt, Jaime Ramon Mercader del Rio Hernandez. On May 6, 1960, Mercader was released from Lecumberri prison and flown immediately to Havana. After some time he arrived in Moscow via Prague, decorated as a Hero of the Soviet Union, under the name of Ramon Lopez. In the mid â€˜70â€™s Mercader returned to Cuba where he died in 1978.

His widow, a mexican woman he married while in prison, took his remains back to Moscow where they lie in Kuntsevo Cemetery. Though his application to the communist party was denied because it was no longer couth to condone Stalinist activities, Mercader has always been revered by the KGB (now the FSP), and holds a high position in the "Memory Room." Solidarity with the Janjaweed, Musa Hilal and Omar al-Bashir. [There is] a new channel by which treachery and espionage penetrate into the Communist Party. It is Zionism. - Klement Gottwald Forgotten Assassin: Ramón Mercader, The Man Who Murdered Leon Trotsky Forgotten Assassin: Ramón Mercader, The Man Who Murdered Leon Trotsky 02/18/13 AT 10:24 AM Close Lee Harvey Oswald, Gavrilo Princip, Nathuram Godse and Sirhan Sirhan comprise the most famous assassins of political figures in the 20th century. Their murderous acts not only changed history but also guaranteed them everlasting infamy and a kind of immortality.

However, some prominent assassins have become forgotten in the mists of time -- one of them was born 100 years ago in Barcelona, Spain. Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río, a Spanish communist and agent for Russia’s notorious NKVD intelligence agency, murdered Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in 1940 under orders from Joseph Stalin. [[nid:1091296]] Trotsky, once one of the most powerful and influential members of the Russian Communist Party and founder and leader of the Red Army, grew dismayed by the rising power of Stalin in the 1920s in the wake of Vladimir Lenin’s death. Sensing a dire threat to his supremacy, Stalin removed Trotsky from power in 1927, forced him out of the party and deported him in 1929 to Turkey, where he remained for four years near Istanbul. After brief (and harried) stays in France and Norway, the heavily guarded Trotsky eventually moved to Mexico, where he continued to oppose Stalin and his policies -- a stance that marked him for death. Trotsky wrote prolifically in Mexico, including a book titled “The Revolution Betrayed,” a vitriolic attack on Stalinism.

(This period coincided with the Great Terror in Russia, whereby Stalin purged tens of thousands of former communist party members, including sham trials, imprisonment and execution of many of Trotsky’s former Bolshevik allies.) However, Trotsky’s years in Mexico were not entirely unpleasant -- he and his family resided in the Coyoacán neighborhood of Mexico City, where he became intimate with married painters Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. (Trotsky and Frida even had an affair.) But Trotsky was living on borrowed time. Enter Jamie Mercader. Mercader’s Cuban-born mother, Eustaquia María Caridad del Río Hernández, who raised him alone in France, was an ardent communist and fanatical Stalinist who fought in the Spanish Civil War and also worked for the Soviet underground. Caridad hailed from a wealthy and aristocratic landowning family in Cuba, while her husband, Pau Mercader, was a rich Catalan industrialist whom she quickly grew bored with and divorced.

(As it turns out, “Mercader” means “merchant” in Catalan.) Growing up in France, Mercader embraced his mother’s ideology, then worked for various leftist organizations in Spain and eventually came to the attention of NKVD recruitment officer Nahum Eitingon, who took him to Moscow to train as a Soviet agent. Mercader’s road to his fateful encounter with Trotsky took some unexpected turns. While studying at the Sorbonne in Paris, he met Sylvia Ageloff, an American friend of Trotsky. As a Soviet spy, Mercader pretended he was Jacques Mornard, the son of a Belgian diplomat and a Trotskyite. Handsome, well-groomed and fluent in French and English, Mercader made a perfect spy for the Soviets. The following year, Mercader followed Ageloff to the U.S., where he assumed the false identity of a Canadian name Frank Jacson. By October 1939, Mercader moved (with his now-lover Ageloff) to Mexico City, where Trotsky and his family were living in exile. Trotsky had already survived prior assassination attempts by other Soviet agents.

One of those agents, a man named Pavel Sudoplatov, claimed in his memoirs that, upon receiving the directive to kill Trotsky from Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s fearsome chief of state security, he selected Mercader to carry out the murder of Trotsky. Using Ageloff as a link, Mercader (as Jacson) befriended Trotsky, pretending to be a sympathizer in order to put the doomed man at ease. Trotsky’s trust in Mercader eventually cost him his life -- on Aug. 20, 1940, Mercader attacked his host with an ice pick, failing to kill him. As Trotsky’s guards seized Mercader, Caridad and Eitingon (waiting outside in getaway vehicles) fled after Mercader failed to show up. Trotsky reportedly ordered his bodyguards not to immediately kill Mercader since he could provide answers behind the conspiracy to assassinate him. But Trotsky died the next day in the hospital from brain injuries and blood loss. Under questioning from Mexican police, Mercader claimed to be Jacques Mornard and alleged he quarreled with Trotsky because the Russian exile refused to bless his impending nuptials with Ageloff.

Mercader received 20 years in prison, while any charges against Ageloff were dropped. According to a document written by Nick Lloyd for the Barcelona Metropolitan, Mercader’s true identity was not revealed until 1952, 12 years into his incarceration, when a Mexican prison guard overheard him singing a nursery rhyme in perfect Catalan (the language of his native Barcelona). Upon Mercader’s release from prison in 1960 (after revealing nothing about his involvement in the conspiracy to kill Trotsky, claiming he acted alone), he was welcomed and feted in Cuba by new communist dictator Fidel Castro. The following year, he traveled to the Soviet Union, where Alexander Shelepin, head of the KGB (by then the dominant Russian intelligence agency) honored Mercader with the Hero of the Soviet Union award, the highest such decoration Moscow offered. Mercader’s mother, the redoubtable Caridad, would work for the Cuban embassy in Paris until her death in 1975. Reportedly, she was fond of the luxurious life in France, although politically she remained a devout Stalinist.

Related Stories Stalin’s Daughter: Defection By Way of India Mercader would subsequently spend the rest of his life shuttling between Havana and Moscow until his death in Cuba in 1978. He was later buried in the Kuntsevo Cemetery in Moscow. One year before his death, in 1977, Mercader wished to return to Spain, given that Fascist dictator Francisco Franco was dead and the Spanish Communist Party was legalized. Santiago Carrillo, then the general secretary of the Communist Party of Spain, who was seeking to break from Moscow, offered Mercader a chance to return home but only if he wrote his memoirs and revealed the identities of all Soviet agents working in Spain as well as their controllers in Moscow. Mercader, a dedicated Stalinist till the very end, refused. Trotsky’s grandson, Vsevolod Volkov, who as a boy came home to find his grandfather dying in his study, wrote many years later: “The plot [to kill Trotsky] proceeded in stages: Stalin, Beria, Eitingon ...

Caridad Mercader and her son, the catalan Ramón Mercader (alias Jacson) were the people who murdered the founder of the Red Army and the comrade-in-arms of Lenin.” Leon Trotsky - My Jewish Learning Leon Trotsky Yiddish Literature in the 20th Century Silencing the Renegade Socialist After Lenin’s death in 1924, a fight for power among leading Bolsheviks ensued, and Joseph Stalin strengthened his own position in the government. Stalin and Trotsky differed on some fundamentals of the communist revolution. While Stalin concentrated on the development of communism in the Soviet Union, Trotsky was dedicated to the belief that Russia should catalyze worldwide communist revolution. In 1926 Trotsky was expelled from the Politburo because of these differences of opinion. In 1927, he was exiled to Kazakhstan, and then two years later, from the Soviet Union. Trotsky lived in Turkey (1929-33), France (1933-35), Norway (1935-36), and finally found asylum in Mexico (1936-1940), where many socialist Jewish exiles from Nazi Germany and elsewhere had settled.

By then, Trotsky had become one of the world’s most outspoken critics of Stalin and his political system. In 1938 Trotsky established the Fourth International, a socialist, anti-Stalinist international movement. Trotsky’s name became the terrifying bogeyman of the Stalinist Soviet Union during the Great Purges of 1936-1938, as one after another Communist Party leader was accused of supporting the exiled renegade. In the United States, on the other hand, Trotskyism enjoyed support of influential critics and intellectuals, some associated with the journal Partisan Review, and many of whom were Jewish. During his period of exile, with the rise of Nazism and state-sponsored anti-Semitism , Trotsky began responding more openly to Jewish issues. In several interviews, he reaffirmed both his opposition to Zionism and his support for Jewish workers making common cause with workers of the countries in which they live. He also recognized the centrality of Jewish workers to the socialist movement in America, and the potential importance of organizing in Yiddish. As Trotsky became louder in his criticism of Stalin, Stalin became more committed to silencing him.

On August 21, 1940, Ramon Mercador, a Stalinist agent who had infiltrated Trotsky’s Mexico City community of socialists, killed him with an ice pick. Please consider making a donation today. Dr. David Shneer, a co-founder of Jewish Mosaic (now Keshet), is a professor of history at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and director of the Program in Jewish Studies there. His work concentrates on modern Jewish culture, Soviet Jewish history, and Jews and sexuality. By David Shneer | August 27, 2009 Lev Davidovitch Bronshteyn was born in 1879 in southern Russia, a part of the Russian empire where more mobile, entrepreneurial Jews had been settling for more than half a century. His parents were wealthy landowners, and though they spoke Yiddish with each other, Lev was raised in a Russian-Jewish milieu.

After completing traditional Jewish school, heder, he was sent to the great southern capital of Odessa, where thinkers and writers like the cultural Zionist Ahad Ha-Am and the Yiddish and Hebrew writer Mendele had turned this commercial port on the shores of the Black Sea into one of the greatest Jewish think tanks of the late 19th century. Wandering & Writing Trotsky reading The Militant, 1931 Trotsky’s political awakening was slow. In his autobiography, he reports that when he first moved to Odessa, he “did not know even the name of Engels , and could hardly say anything definite about Marx . As a matter of fact, I probably had never heard of him.” But the installation of the conservative Tsar Nicholas II in 1895, which dashed liberal hopes after the death of Alexander III, and Trotsky’s own move to a new, more radical school possibly awakened political tendencies in him. In 1896, Bronshteyn joined a small cell of underground socialists in Odessa. Since socialism was illegal, he was arrested two years later by tsarist police and eventually exiled to Siberia, a common punishment for political prisoners.

In 1902, Bronshteyn, who now went by the name Trotsky as a means of masking his identity in exile, escaped and ended up in London where he met Georgy Plekhanov, founder of the Social Democrats, the Marxist party that would spawn the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks . In London, Trotsky also met the future leader of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Vladimir Lenin. Trotsky, Plekhanov, and Lenin worked together on the Social Democrats’ newspaper Iskra (The Spark), the future Pravda, mouthpiece of world communism. In 1905, during the first leftist attempt to overthrow the tsars, Trotsky returned to Russia and in St. Petersburg he organized the first revolutionary soviet–a city council run by popular election. This was the socialists’ attempt to organize rule from below, by the workers of the city, rather than from above by the tsars. At age 26, Trotsky was appointed president of the Petersburg soviet.

After the tsars agreed to relinquish autocratic power and set up a parliament called the Duma, ending the 1905 revolution, Trotsky, whose politics were still too radical, was again arrested, imprisoned, and exiled to Siberia. However, he managed to escape once more, this time to Vienna. Trotsky worked as a journalist in Vienna, and he eventually became an editor of the underground Pravda. He kept a close eye on Russian affairs, and wrote bitterly about the 1913 Beilis trial, when a Jewish factory owner, Mendel Beilis, was put on trial under false charges that he ritually murdered a Christian child around the time of Passover. Trotsky argued that the case proved that tsarist Russia was intrinsically anti-Semitic, and the only solution to anti-Semitism in Russia was to overthrow the regime. With the outbreak of World War I , Trotsky began another nomadic period. He moved to Zurich in 1914 and then to Germany, where he was briefly imprisoned for opposing the war, which socialists understood as a conflict between imperial capitalist leaders, being unnecessarily fought by the working classes of each nation.

In 1915 he moved to Paris, editing the socialist weekly Nashe Slovo (Our Word), but he was expelled from France for anti-war activities. After a short stay in New York as the editor of the socialist newspaper Novy Mir (New World), Trotsky returned to Russia in 1917. He joined the Bolsheviks in St. Petersburg and established the magazine Forward (Vperyod), related only to the more famous Yiddish-language Forverts by their socialist politics. Come the Revolution! In October 1917, the Bolsheviks overthrew the provisional government, and Trotsky’s politics became mainstream. The establishment of the Soviet Union exposed Trotsky’s ambivalence about his Jewishness. At first Trotsky refused a high position in the Bolshevik government, because he thought it would not serve the interests of the new communist regime if too many Jews occupied important positions. He ultimately accepted, and during the civil war that broke out after the Bolshevik takeover, he became head of the Red Army and a member of the Politburo, the decision-making body of the fledgling government.

In the chaos of civil war, new waves of anti-Jewish pogroms broke out throughout Ukraine, and Trotsky considered, but ultimately rejected, the idea of organizing special Jewish sections within the Red Army . When the Chief Rabbi of Moscow, Jacob Maze, asked Trotsky personally for extra security to protect Russian Jews from these pogroms, Trotsky answered that he was a Bolshevik and did not consider himself a Jew. Silencing the Renegade Socialist After Lenin’s death in 1924, a fight for power among leading Bolsheviks ensued, and Joseph Stalin strengthened his own position in the government. Stalin and Trotsky differed on some fundamentals of the communist revolution. While Stalin concentrated on the development of communism in the Soviet Union, Trotsky was dedicated to the belief that Russia should catalyze worldwide communist revolution. In 1926 Trotsky was expelled from the Politburo because of these differences of opinion. In 1927, he was exiled to Kazakhstan, and then two years later, from the Soviet Union.

Trotsky lived in Turkey (1929-33), France (1933-35), Norway (1935-36), and finally found asylum in Mexico (1936-1940), where many socialist Jewish exiles from Nazi Germany and elsewhere had settled. By then, Trotsky had become one of the world’s most outspoken critics of Stalin and his political system. In 1938 Trotsky established the Fourth International, a socialist, anti-Stalinist international movement. Trotsky’s name became the terrifying bogeyman of the Stalinist Soviet Union during the Great Purges of 1936-1938, as one after another Communist Party leader was accused of supporting the exiled renegade. In the United States, on the other hand, Trotskyism enjoyed support of influential critics and intellectuals, some associated with the journal Partisan Review, and many of whom were Jewish. During his period of exile, with the rise of Nazism and state-sponsored anti-Semitism , Trotsky began responding more openly to Jewish issues. In several interviews, he reaffirmed both his opposition to Zionism and his support for Jewish workers making common cause with workers of the countries in which they live.

He also recognized the centrality of Jewish workers to the socialist movement in America, and the potential importance of organizing in Yiddish. As Trotsky became louder in his criticism of Stalin, Stalin became more committed to silencing him. On August 21, 1940, Ramon Mercador, a Stalinist agent who had infiltrated Trotsky’s Mexico City community of socialists, killed him with an ice pick. Trotsky’s most important biographer, Isaac Deutscher, coined the phrase “non-Jewish Jew” to describe Trotsky and his generation of universalist thinkers. Like Rosa Luxemburg (“Red Rosa”), who was murdered in 1919 for being too far left of the emerging socialist order in post-World War I Berlin, Trotsky’s life was cut short for being a loud-mouthed socialist. Despite his aversion to any self-identification as a Jew, Trotsky’s biography of universal ideas, constant physical movement, and dramatic assassination, reads like a very Jewish 20th-century story.

Leon Trotsky is Killed by Soviet Agent Ramón Mercader | World History Project Aug 21 1940 Leon Trotsky is Killed by Soviet Agent Ramón Mercader Despite the misgivings of Natalia and Trotsky's guards, Mornard was again allowed to see Trotsky alone—"three or four minutes went by," Natalia relates: "I was in the room next door. There was a terrible piercing cry... Lev Davidovich appeared, leaning against the door frame. His face was covered with blood, his blue eyes glistening without spectacles and his arms hung limply by his side..." Mornard had struck Trotsky a fatal blow in the back of the head with a cut-down ice axe concealed in his raincoat. But the blow was not immediately lethal; Trotsky "screamed very long, infinitely long," as Mercader himself put it—and Trotsky courageously grappled with his assassin, preventing further blows. Source: 'Forty Years Since Leon Trotsky's Assassination'; Lynn Walsh, Militant International Review, Summer, 1980, Added by: Colin Harris Concealed within the raincoat slung over his arm, Mercador had an ice pick and a 14-inch blade.

As the defenceless Trotsky leaned over his manuscript, Jacson-Mornard-Mercador plunged the ice pick into his skull. Despite his mortal injury, Trotsky fought back, and restrained the assassin until his bodyguards entered the room. Although the injury at first appeared relatively superficial, Trotsky died a day later after an unsuccessful operation. So ended the life of a man who was an exemplary Marxist theoretician and revolutionary leader. His cowardly murderer, Mercador, was jailed by the Mexican authorities, but on his release was awarded the Order of Lenin by Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow in 1961. Source: 'The assassination of Leon Trotsky'; Alex Miller, Green Left, December 9, 2009. Added by: Colin Harris On 20 August 1940, Trotsky was attacked in his home in Mexico with an ice axe by undercover NKVD agent Ramón Mercader. The blow was poorly delivered and failed to kill Trotsky instantly, as Mercader had intended. Witnesses stated that Trotsky spat on Mercader and began struggling fiercely with him.

Hearing the commotion, Trotsky's bodyguards burst into the room and nearly killed Mercader, but Trotsky stopped them, laboriously stating that the assassin should be made to answer questions. Trotsky was taken to a hospital, operated on, and survived for more than a day, dying at the age of 60 on 21 August 1940 as a result of severe brain damage. Mercader later testified at his trial: I laid my raincoat on the table in such a way as to be able to remove the ice axe which was in the pocket. I decided not to miss the wonderful opportunity that presented itself. The moment Trotsky began reading the article, he gave me my chance; I took out the ice axe from the raincoat, gripped it in my hand and, with my eyes closed, dealt him a terrible blow on the head. According to James P. Cannon, the secretary of the Socialist Workers Party (USA), Trotsky's last words were "I will not survive this attack. Stalin has finally accomplished the task he attempted unsuccessfully before." Source: Wikipedia Added by: Colin Harris More information Fiction Book Review: The Obedient Assassin: A Novel Based on a True Story by John P. Davidson.

Delphinium (HarperCollins, dist.), $24.95 (320p) ISBN 978-1-88-328558-6 Powell's ADVERTISEMENT Davidson (The Long Road North) tries his hand at a thriller centered on the assassination of Leon Trotsky in 1940 Mexico City with mixed results. In the strong opening, Lt. Ramón Mercador, an officer fighting for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, returns home from the front, only to learn from his mother, Caridad, that his brother, Pablo, has been killed for disobeying orders. That tragedy is only exacerbated for Ramón because his mother, to prove her loyalty to the anti-Franco movement, remained silent as Pablo was strapped with dynamite and forced to run in front of a tank before being crushed. Caridad bears orders from Stalin for Ramónto to go undercover and, eventually, murder Trotsky, whom Stalin blamed for the infighting of the Spanish Republicans, which ultimately led to their defeat. Davidson has clearly done his historical research, but no character, especially the lead, feels truly alive, and the plot offers little suspense.

Agent: Emma Patterson, Brandt and Hochman Literary Agents. (Feb.) DETAILS The Assassination of Leon Trotsky By Jennifer Rosenberg Updated September 16, 2016. Leon Trotsky , a leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution , had been one of the possible successors to V. I. Lenin. When Joseph Stalin won the power struggle for Soviet leadership, Trotsky was exiled from the Soviet Union. Exile wasn't enough for Stalin, however, and he sent assassins to kill Trotsky. Trotsky was attacked on August 20, 1940 by an ice pick; he died a day later. The Assassination of Leon Trotsky Around 5:30 p.m. on August 20, 1940, Leon Trotsky was sitting at his desk in his study, helping Ramon Mercader (known to him as Frank Jackson) edit an article. Mercader waited until Trotsky started to read the article, then snuck up behind Trotsky and slammed a mountaineering ice pick into Trotsky's skull. Trotsky fought back and even remained standing long enough to say his murderer's name to those coming to his aid.

When Trotsky's bodyguards found Mercader, they began beating him and only stopped when Trotsky himself said, "Don't kill him. continue reading below our video 10 Facts About the Titanic That You Don't Know He must talk!" Trotsky was taken to a local hospital, where the doctors tried to save him by twice operating on his brain. Unfortunately the damage was too severe. Trotsky died at the hospital on August 21, 1940, just over 25 hours after being attacked. Trotsky was 60 years old. The Assassin Mercader was handed over to the Mexican police and claimed his name was Jacques Mornard (his real identity wasn't discovered until 1953). Mercader was found guilty of murder and sentenced to 20 years in jail. He was released from jail in 1960.

Question: Who did Ramon Mercador kill in 1940?
Answer: Leon Trotsky